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Volume CXVI, No. 2
National Speaker of the House John Boehner told House Republicans that a lawsuit against President Obama over his executive action on immigration may be the best – or only – course of action. “We are finalizing a plan to authorize litigation on this issue, one we believe gives us the best chance of success,” Boehner told GOP lawmakers at their weekly conference meeting, according to a Republican official in the room. A Florida woman who claimed self-defense after prosecutors say she fired a gun at her es tranged husband and his two sons will be released from prison as part of a plea agreement. Marissa Alexander was sentenced on Tuesday to the 1,095 days she has already served in jail after pleading guilty to three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for the 2010 shooting. She also received two years of house arrest.
International The Chinese yuan has become one of the top five most-used currencies in the world, according to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The yuan now ranks behind the dollar, the euro, the British pound and the Japanese yen. Beijing is gradually easing controls on the yuan and encouraging its use abroad in an effort to reduce costs for its traders and increase Chinese companies’ role in the global economy. The yuan, also known as the renminbi, accounted for 2.17 percent of global payments in December, behind the yen’s share of 2.69, according to Swift. The U.S. dollar’s share is about 45 percent. Gunmen stormed a luxury hotel in Libya and killed 10 people, including an American, a French citizen and three people from Asia on Tuesday. Two attackers were killed following a standoff which lasted several hours in the parking lot of the seaside Corinthia Hotel, which is used often by diplomats and businessmen.
This week’s “Top Stories” were compiled by Brendan Raleigh with information from CNN.com.
Thursday, January 29,
2015
Thursday, January 29, 2015
FREE
G-Burg student founds textbook sharing website
Wei Xiong’s ScholarOasis allows students to buy and sell textbooks without a middleman Photos Courtesy of Gettysburg.edu
B y A nika J ensen S taff W riter ScholarOasis is a website created by Gettysburg College student Wei Xiong ‘15 that allows students to buy and sell textbooks within their campus communities. Founded in 2014, the middleman-free website requires no commission from sellers to help students save money and even rewards those who sell their books for less than market price. Because of the local nature of the trading process, students meet in person to buy and sell, eliminating the insecurity of purchasing online and high bookstore prices. Wei Xiong, a senior computer science major with a minor in economics, began working on ScholarOasis during the spring of his junior year, when he was granted a $10,000 award from the Entrepreneurial Fellowship after proposing and presenting a business plan. “I thought I would give it a shot because I like to grab every opportunity,” Xiong said. Xiong claimed that ScholarOasis was not a unique idea. “I think all the students may have thought of the same thing. Textbooks are just so expensive here,” he mentioned. “And it is almost impossible to trade books for a class because you do not know who was taken it.”
Gettysburg College student Wei Xiong recently founded ScholarOasis, a textbook sharing website designed to help students save money on their purchases and have a place to sell their books at the end of each semester. ScholarOasis therefore takes shared information from students and allows them to communicate, cutting off the middleman and returning all profits to the students. In creating ScholarOasis, Xiong started out on the wrong path. Using the content management system (CMS) to build his website, he realized he was being restrained and decided to use an approach called Web Development Freedoms.
“After the first few weeks trying to figure everything out I realized it was all limited,” Xiong said. “What I needed were new functions to form my own business logic.” The entrepreneurial project even helped Xiong with his computer science capstone. The Center for Career Development provided s up po rt for X i o ng , as did numerous alumni in the entrepreneurial field. “People were support-
ing and counting on me. I wanted to succeed more than anyone else,” he stated. Xiong also gained important experience from an internship with a company that does web applications. “I used different technology but did some of the same things,” he said. While Xiong has had success so far with about 300 students registered, he believes ScholarOasis can go further. “That’s potential, what
is going to happen when we have 500 members? 1,000 members?” He hopes the purpose of his company will expand past trading books and expects this semester to be better than the last. His focus for the future lies in underclassmen, who may be more open to trying new methods of buying textbooks. “Most users are [firstyears], and I think that is great because they will be here for a long time.”
College fieldhouse installs new, ecofriendly lights New light system is expected to pay for itself within the next two to three years B y J ulia R entsch S taff W riter Gettysburg College has installed new LED lights in its athletic fieldhouse, the John A. Hauser Fieldhouse. The new lights will provide energy savings amounting to twelve thousand dollars per year, and are expected to have a maintenance-free lifespan of five to ten years. “As a department, we’re pretty proud of [the installation] because it’s a big savings, not just in money, but in energy, too,” said Roger Heyser, Associate Director of Operations in Gettysburg College’s Facilities Services Department. Heyser estimates that the lights will save enough energy for their cost to be recouped within two to three years. Each light has a wire guard over a thick glass lens
Inside This Issue
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Weird News, pg. 2
to help avoid breakage. The lights also come with motion sensors that will activate only when there is m o v em en t d i r ect l y u n d er neath them. “That means that somebody can be playing basketball on one court that gets lit, while the rest of the gym stays dark to save on energy,” explained Heyser. Over the past few years, the college has searched for ways to make its facilities more energy-efficient, and installing LEDs has proven a successful method. LEDs have also been installed in Gettysburg’s dining hall and in some exterior lamps. This has caused a downward trend in the college’s energy consumption due to the lower energy requirement for each new bulb. “That’s just the way the industry is going,” said Heyser. “We used to have ninety-six fixtures in the
New exhibit in Special Collections, pg. 3
Photo Credit: gettysburg.edu
The lighting in John A. Hauser Fieldhouse has been altered to make the building more environmentally and financially friendly. field house. Now there’s only forty-eight LEDs, but more light.” The old lights have been recycled. The fieldhouse is named after the former president of the Musselman Foundation
Mars rover, pg. 4
and was opened for general use in September of 1973. It has a playing surface of 24,500 square feet and contains three full-size basketball courts, four regulation tennis courts, five volleyball courts, and a
1/11-mile, four-lane track. It has been used as a practice venue for many of Gettysburg’s varsity and recreational teams and is often utilized by outside organizations for camps and auctions.
Why Women’s Tips to beat the humor is basketball winter blues, important in defeats F&M, pg. 5 leadership, pg. 8 pg. 6